Getting hit with a $32.5 million patent damages verdict—like the one Sonos laid on Google and its lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan—can’t feel good for the trial team. But it probably softens any sore feelings when the judge overseeing your opponent calls your opponent a “pretender” in a post-trial ruling, as Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup did with Sonos last week. 

“This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new,” wrote Alsup, knocking out the verdict and invalidating the underlying patents. “This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first—wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor’s products from an ancient application.”

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